drshapeless
Htmx, Datastar, greedy developer
Create: 2025-07-13, Update: 2025-07-13
Background
Sometime ago, I was really interested in htmx. I have even built some tools in Emacs for myself to write htmx. But htmx is sometime a pain in the butt, especially for some big form. Therefore, I looked for an alternative.
In some random reddit post, I came across datastar, which is another hypermedia library, but uses SSE and signals. It claims to have both of the good thing from htmx and alpine.js. The author has a stand that he thought using form in htmx to communicate with server is a mistake, json should be used instead.
Conversion
I had a running service written in htmx for some time. It is a clinic opening hour service to inform my patients when I will be available in which clinic. (Yes, I am not a programmer, but a healthcare professional.)
I decided to swap my whole service from htmx to datastar. And I have been working on it for a couple of weeks.
Shocking news
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